Collection of Work |
This page is dedicated to my work through the MAED program at Michigan State.
There are essays about my motivations to get my degree and what I plan on doing with it, as well as work I completed along the way that were influential to the journey. The SHOWCASE tabs house a collection of works that I believe show my growth throughout the past year and a half. The first section, "Alternative Displays of Learning," reflects one of my big takeaways from MSU: there are other ways of showing understanding other than writing an essay. The second section displays essays that demonstrate deeper understanding of my practice. |
Why I Got My Masters
I specifically chose to obtain my master's degree online from Michigan State for a number of reasons. First, as a full-time teacher with a family, I lacked the time to attend in-person classes. Secondly, I did not like the programs being offered at any of the colleges in Hawaii. I will forever be grateful to the University of Hawaii system that I obtained three degrees from, but I needed a program focused on hands-on application of knowledge, not theory. Finally, I wanted to fight against a paradigm that plagues my community: that we are inferior to the continental United States.
Being from Hawaii carries a certain stigma; since most of the United States simply considers it a vacation spot, we must be on vacation all the time. Although this concept seems benign, its roots are not. Hawaii was the first overseas conquest of the burgeoning American Empire at the end of the 19th Century. This colonial attitude remains imbued on the psyche of Americans and the people of Hawaii.
Since we are supposed to be part of America, we are held to the same standards as the rest of the country. Our students take the same metrics that all American schoolchildren do. We even bring in standardized curriculum from major publishers. But because of a number of factors, including the vast differences of experiences, both cultural and economic, Hawaii students often do poorly. I remember teaching a poetry unit with an assessment that utilized poems about winter. How can students who have never seen snow analyze poetry about it?
I wish I had written down every time I have met an "expert from the Mainland." Even as a student I remember visiting delegations of people coming to help our school. When I began teaching, there were required trainings from these "experts" who knew more about my students than I did, despite only having been on island for less than a week.
One of the most valuable lessons I remember from high school came from Mrs. Lewis, my 11th and 12th grade English teacher, who said: "If you don't have a solution to the problem, you don't get to complain." I decided to do something about it. What did the "experts" have that I did not? The answer came abruptly in a school meeting when an administrator said: "I do not understand why classroom teachers with bachelor's degrees think they know more than PhDs." I had to go back and get an advanced degree.
Not only did I want an advanced degree, I wanted a degree from a "real" university. The stigma against Hawaii schools extends to our University system. Furthermore, it became an opportunity to add the voice of a Hawaii teacher to the Michigan State College of Education.
Now that I have come to the end of this program, I do believe I have achieved my goals. I will get that diploma, and all of its honorifics. I will also have displayed what educators from Hawaii can do.
What I did not expect was that this journey helped me get back to why I became a teacher. The past four years in the classroom were focused on survival; getting students through content, passing teacher evaluations, and balancing work and family life. I had lost sight of a lot of what I wanted to accomplish. By evaluating my teaching philosophy again and taking the time to think about my practice, I have become a better teacher.
mydegree.pdf | |
File Size: | 16 kb |
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Showcase 1: ALTERNATIVE DISPLAYS OF LEARNING
A major part of my teaching philosophy is to teach differently than my colleagues. It was my goal throughout my studies to open myself up to new ways of assessing learning. I was able to demonstrate those concepts through the projects below. This is the kind of work I hope my students will complete. By allowing students to have more say in how they show their learning, they will have better chance to succeed. Furthermore, students have different strengths that will aid them in life, it is important to help them develop various skills.
Thinking VisuallyI created this image while completing a class on teaching creativity. It was a great experience thinking of alternative ways to show information. If a picture is worth a thousand words, why not let students show their learning? It also allows students to explore other skillsets they do not typically use in a school setting.
Creating ContentWhy do we spend so much time in education creating things that have little value to our lives? Professors who focused on our growth as teachers and creating things that could be taken directly into our classrooms were very influential on me. This lesson plan is an early example of expanding my practice using technology.
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Using PoetryThis poem also came from the teaching creativity class. I spent a lot of time in that class advocating for a Hawaiian Point of View. Poetry requires a higher level of language usage, as well as an emotional connection to the content; a quality we need to generate more in our students.
Creating ResourcesTo further the idea of our schoolwork reaching out of the classroom, I find great value in having students communicate their new expertise to other. This assignment has us find online educational tools and share them with our peers.
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Showcase 2: Past ESSAYS
Although I feel learning can be represented in a variety of forms, we must also recognize the written word. These are a selection of essays I feel best demonstrates what I accomplished in this program.
Cultural Observation EssayThis was one of the most difficult essays I completed during my tenure. Being tasked with gleaning understanding of the Maori Culture from watching "Whale Rider" made me very uncomfortable. I combated this by placing a note at the end of the essay. It validated my ideals that you should not sacrifice your values for academic reasons, and educators should never put students in a situation where they must.
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Classroom Management PlanThis project was created during an advanced classroom management course. The final plan outlines the preemptive steps I take in setting a classroom culture to foster learning. I used this assignment to document things that come naturally to me as an educator to further document my teaching to later share with other teachers.
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Final Reflective EssayA final reflection in where I wanted to take the skills that I had learned from thinking creatively. This is a second example of documenting my philosophy and practice to utilize in helping other teachers grow their own.
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Kite Runner AnalysisAn essay that allowed us to choose a film to analyze using all the techniques we had gathered over the semester. Although this was simply for a final paper for an elective, it demonstrates how student choice can drive excellence.
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Transcript
Summer 2017
Teacher Education 818 -
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Teacher Education 831 -
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Fall 2017
Counseling, Educational Psychology & Special Education 818 -
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Education 800 -
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Spring 2018
Counseling, Educational Psychology & Special Education 817 -
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Teacher Education 822 -
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Summer 2018
Counseling, Educational Psychology & Special Education 883 -
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Teacher Education 838 -
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Fall 2018
Counseling, Educational Psychology & Special Education 816 -
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Education 870 -
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Future Learning goals
What Comes Next?
Now that I have come to the end of my degree journey, I have been asked what my next goals are. This took a long time to process because, I don’t have goals. I just want to teach. I have always been a teacher to others: helping friends with homework, being a leader in Boy Scouts, working with elementary students during high school, and coaching swimming. As I have elaborated on above, I went on this journey so that I could better express the philosophies I have as a teacher. Now that I have reached the conclusion, it is back to the classroom. But my teaching does not have to be limited by the four walls of my room. After refocusing myself on my classroom, I can turn to support other teachers and work to create a better educational system from the ground up.
Improving my Practice
My primary focus at all times is being the best teacher I can be for my students. This is especially true at this moment since I am working in a new school and teaching a content area I have not spent much time with before. Now that my master’s program is at a close, I am going to be taking a lot of time to realign what I am doing in the classroom to what I learned through the course of study. I got this degree so that I could be better at helping students, and that is what I plan on doing.
Leading By Example
It is important to me to focus on improving my practice first, because I have always found the best way to lead is by example. The best way to bring about change in others’ classrooms is to show them how in your own. If I continue to make my classroom a place of excellence in learning, other teachers and administrators will come to me for advice on improving their practice. I have already begun sharing curriculum ideas with coworkers. This past week, I assisted in designing a learning capstone project for our school. These types of projects are welcome challenges that I enjoy that allow me to teach more students by extension. This website will continue the work of displaying what I am working on so I continue to build my professional presence. I hope the work I display in the “About Our Class” blog opens doors for educators and my students alike.
Reaching Outside the School
Once I can get to a place where I am comfortable helping other teachers within my school, I want to get to a point where I can help teachers in other schools. I have already mentored student teachers with the University of Hawaii West Oahu College of Education. During numerous courses, and featured in my portfolio, are designs to create a professional development for teachers new to teaching Hawaiian History. Although I do not have the resources to offer this course currently, I want to continue to grow my professional network. I can help more students by helping teachers.
It will take quite a while for me to implement these goals, and for the first time in my life, I am able to appreciate the time it will take. Although I have this degree, I will never truly be a master of my craft. It will always evolve and change to adapt to my students’ needs.
In short, now that I have this degree, it is time to teach.
Improving my Practice
My primary focus at all times is being the best teacher I can be for my students. This is especially true at this moment since I am working in a new school and teaching a content area I have not spent much time with before. Now that my master’s program is at a close, I am going to be taking a lot of time to realign what I am doing in the classroom to what I learned through the course of study. I got this degree so that I could be better at helping students, and that is what I plan on doing.
Leading By Example
It is important to me to focus on improving my practice first, because I have always found the best way to lead is by example. The best way to bring about change in others’ classrooms is to show them how in your own. If I continue to make my classroom a place of excellence in learning, other teachers and administrators will come to me for advice on improving their practice. I have already begun sharing curriculum ideas with coworkers. This past week, I assisted in designing a learning capstone project for our school. These types of projects are welcome challenges that I enjoy that allow me to teach more students by extension. This website will continue the work of displaying what I am working on so I continue to build my professional presence. I hope the work I display in the “About Our Class” blog opens doors for educators and my students alike.
Reaching Outside the School
Once I can get to a place where I am comfortable helping other teachers within my school, I want to get to a point where I can help teachers in other schools. I have already mentored student teachers with the University of Hawaii West Oahu College of Education. During numerous courses, and featured in my portfolio, are designs to create a professional development for teachers new to teaching Hawaiian History. Although I do not have the resources to offer this course currently, I want to continue to grow my professional network. I can help more students by helping teachers.
It will take quite a while for me to implement these goals, and for the first time in my life, I am able to appreciate the time it will take. Although I have this degree, I will never truly be a master of my craft. It will always evolve and change to adapt to my students’ needs.
In short, now that I have this degree, it is time to teach.
Read As PDF | |
File Size: | 48 kb |
File Type: |
Final Synthesis essay
What Does it All Mean?
As all educators know, it is impossible to relate content without context. And the context of what I learned about getting this degree is harrowing. I had finally gotten to a point in my practice where I had mastered the day to day minutia of running a classroom and was now able to identify myself as a leader within the school. But something was not right. The students were not responding like they had in previous years. I was more frustrated than usual. At the end of the school year, right as I was about to begin my courses, I failed my teacher evaluation.
The failure was technical: I had not documented that my students had made progress on a given skill. This was something I always completed at the end of the school year. My working theory was that as long as I was teaching to best of my ability, the data would prove itself in the end. As classes began to close out, I suddenly found myself sitting in the Principal’s office, being informed I was to be labelled as a “marginal” teacher. My scheduled raise was delayed until I could prove my “effectiveness” the next school year in a more intensive evaluation. As much as I told everyone around me that the rating did not matter to me, it took my best friend to see through the wall I put up around my feelings. It really hurt.
But wait, why was I not effective as a teacher? I will admit, it was not my best year on record. I attempted some changes in my methods that did not translate to the data collection that I placed as a secondary measurement of my success. The changes had not quite panned out like I had hope they would, but is that not part of growing as a professional? Furthermore, why was I being punished with further evaluations and not assisted? At no point had anyone offered meaningful solutions to my problem, other than to primarily focus on the data collection; a fundamental departure from my teaching philosophy. I had finally mastered the daily practices of being a teacher, yet I was not teaching effectively, by the Department of Education’s standards, or, truthfully, to mine.
After much reflection, I realized that in those early years of my practice, I had shed many of my core teaching beliefs and more extreme pedagogical methods in favor of things that just worked, was easier, or would not cause conflict with my colleagues. I had lost who I was as an educator; or rather, who I was supposed to be. When I started teaching, I wanted to be the better teacher. What exactly that meant was still ambiguous at the time, but I knew I never wanted to give worksheets or homework. Maybe I just wanted to be the most popular teacher, but I knew there were a number of things that I had done in school that made no sense or left any bearing on my professional development. I think all teachers try to be the teacher they needed growing up, and I needed a peculiar type of teacher I had never quite encountered. In addition, my college years opened my eyes to the lack of Hawaiian culture integration in our classrooms. Living in Hawaii, I decided that it was important for students to be provided opportunities to learn, engage, and embrace education through the “lens” of our island’s ancestors. I wanted to incorporate olelo Hawaii, or at least talk Pidgin, with my students. My lessons and units were designed to be Hawaii-centric and anti-Imperialist. “The Pedagogy of Aloha” by Dr. Ku Kahakalau was something I felt should be innate to teaching in Hawaii: focusing on relationships to cultivate relevance and rigor. Yet, at the end of my fifth year in the classroom, I was not that teacher. It was under these conditions that I began taking courses in the summer of 2017. Little did I realize that at the end of 2018, my life would be radically different from where I started; and my practice would by radically improved.
In that first summer, I took Teacher Education (TE) 818: Curriculum in its Social Context. That class had me revisit the historic and political reasons why schools function and their place within American society. This was a perfect class to start my educational journey as it made me examine all of the issues that I had with schools in general. I found great commonality with thinkers like Sir Ken Robinson and Todd Rose. Robinson rallies against the past factory-like models of education that produce like-minded workers, and suggests teachers force their students to be creative. Rose argues to destroy the very core concepts of comparing students to each other, and ultimately against a non-existent “average student.” Although I had found these thinkers before starting my masters program, it was in this first summer that I was able to step back from my practice and question my methods. I was able to revisit my teaching philosophy and remember why I had become a teacher in the first place. This also could not have happened if I had not taken the summer off to focus on my studies.
The next semester, I took two courses: one was the most affirming class I had in my program, and the other, the most difficult. In Counseling, Educational Psychology & Special Education (CEP) 818: Creativity in Teaching and Learning I found a professor who demonstrated all of the things I wanted to do in my teaching. Dr. Carmen Mahealani Richardson set up the class to extend student thinking. This allowed me to reconsider and create ways to incorporate creativity into my classroom. The class focused on experimentation, collaboration, and reflection. Students created different products to reflect their understanding of the material, and were encouraged to attempt other mediums to show comprehension. Through these elements, students were encouraged to reflect and act in ways that allowed for personal growth. Her grading system clearly reflected her goals, allowing everyone to start at a 4.0, or A, and only detracted points if the expectations of the class were not being met. This kind of inversion of an age-old educational structure spoke to me and gave me courage to try similar deviations in my practice. Finally, she was able to give me further personal encouragement as she is an educator on Hawaii Island, working towards one of my personal goals to empower Hawaiian students.
While my creative fires were ablaze in CEP 818, Education (ED) 800: Educational Inquiry felt like a torrential downpour upon them. The expectations of this course were the polar opposite: read a text, write a paper, get credit for the work. In contrast to the elevation and encouragement received in CEP 818, I was being critiqued over miniscule details in ED 800. When I questioned the relevance of the content, I was encouraged to just knuckle down and get the work in. My written conclusions were judged and demerited in my grade. Despite this difficulty, ED 800 led me to one of my most influential revelations of my program: Academics and educators are not equivalent. While someone may know a whole lot about a particular topic, that does not qualify them to lead others in exploring that content. Inversely, just because someone is a teacher does not mean they have the skillset to handle the rigors of academia. This was liberating for me, especially as I looked at my goals as a teacher: to reach students who did not do particularly well in school. We do not all have to be academics, we simply have to succeed in our calling. I connected this back to my experience as a swimmer and a coach: just because someone was fast in the water did not mean they could successfully guide a novice in strokework. In fact, I usually noticed the opposite. For a gifted athlete, the fundamentals come naturally and easily and explaining them to someone who just does not get it can be frustrating.
While it was difficult juggling the duality of my Fall 2017 semester, it helped me bring to light my philosophy of education that I had worked on during the summer into practice. I was teaching a line of Hawaiian History and Civics and was able to implement more creativity and Hawaiian culture. I had also been given leadership over a small team, which I immediately shifted the focus from quantitative data collection to teacher well-being and efficacy. I took the aspects of learning creatively and adapted them to leading creativity. Over the course of the year, my team would regularly report that they felt listened to and respected. Instead of collecting the quantitative data on perceived teacher efficacy, I referenced it through qualitative data, such as personal narratives, which was presented to the school administration.
Though I was getting confirmation that my philosophy and practices were successful among colleagues, I was not getting the same responses by administration. I later found out that my direct supervisor was receiving a lot of criticism from the administration that I was not fulfilling my leadership position properly; according to them, I was lacking in context-based quantitative data they needed for their purposes. In my enhanced teacher evaluation, I received an “effective” score, despite displaying some lessons for observation that I thought had been perfect encapsulations of my best teaching practices. It became evident that my newly articulated philosophy and practice were not appreciated in the school I was at. It was time for a change. At the behest of my wife, I applied to teach at Kamehameha Schools, and all Native Hawaiian private school. This was a radical departure for me, since I have always been an advocate for the necessity of quality public education, but I needed to find a school that would recognize and respect my philosophy. The support I have received at Kamehameha has allowed me to enact my pedagogy to its potential, and become the teacher I want to be.
Now, at the end of this journey, I am able to come to a very clear conclusion over the message I can take away from this program: Education should be focused directly on the development of the innate individuality of students, and not a standard set of exercises for everyone to undertake in a comparison of ability. Schools should abandon structures like ED 800: rigid, monolithic, and demanding conformity. Instead, they should look more like CEP 818: encouraging, differentiated, and growth based. Our jobs as educators should be to bring out the best in each student, whatever their best might be, accepting that it may not be strictly within our definition of the content. Rather, we need to help students apply themselves into their definition of the content and evaluate themselves in their understanding.
This is not a call for abandoning materials considered essential to learning in favor of total student choice; students must still be challenged with ideas outside of their understanding and extended into deeper thoughts. But the methods and mediums of gaining and expressing that understanding should be a collaboration between the teacher and the individual student. There is no reason why students can not demonstrate their understanding in different ways.
Critics of this approach would be concerned that allowing students control over their evaluation would lead to a lack of rigor. Their view is that students are apt to take an “easy way out” such as drawing a picture instead of writing an essay. I argue that if the teacher creates a genuine working relationship with the student, with clear expectations, that the student choosing to produce a visual will create a Mona Lisa rather of a stick figure. I also challenge those critics to try their hand in creating some of the works that I have received over the past year, such as these below:
The failure was technical: I had not documented that my students had made progress on a given skill. This was something I always completed at the end of the school year. My working theory was that as long as I was teaching to best of my ability, the data would prove itself in the end. As classes began to close out, I suddenly found myself sitting in the Principal’s office, being informed I was to be labelled as a “marginal” teacher. My scheduled raise was delayed until I could prove my “effectiveness” the next school year in a more intensive evaluation. As much as I told everyone around me that the rating did not matter to me, it took my best friend to see through the wall I put up around my feelings. It really hurt.
But wait, why was I not effective as a teacher? I will admit, it was not my best year on record. I attempted some changes in my methods that did not translate to the data collection that I placed as a secondary measurement of my success. The changes had not quite panned out like I had hope they would, but is that not part of growing as a professional? Furthermore, why was I being punished with further evaluations and not assisted? At no point had anyone offered meaningful solutions to my problem, other than to primarily focus on the data collection; a fundamental departure from my teaching philosophy. I had finally mastered the daily practices of being a teacher, yet I was not teaching effectively, by the Department of Education’s standards, or, truthfully, to mine.
After much reflection, I realized that in those early years of my practice, I had shed many of my core teaching beliefs and more extreme pedagogical methods in favor of things that just worked, was easier, or would not cause conflict with my colleagues. I had lost who I was as an educator; or rather, who I was supposed to be. When I started teaching, I wanted to be the better teacher. What exactly that meant was still ambiguous at the time, but I knew I never wanted to give worksheets or homework. Maybe I just wanted to be the most popular teacher, but I knew there were a number of things that I had done in school that made no sense or left any bearing on my professional development. I think all teachers try to be the teacher they needed growing up, and I needed a peculiar type of teacher I had never quite encountered. In addition, my college years opened my eyes to the lack of Hawaiian culture integration in our classrooms. Living in Hawaii, I decided that it was important for students to be provided opportunities to learn, engage, and embrace education through the “lens” of our island’s ancestors. I wanted to incorporate olelo Hawaii, or at least talk Pidgin, with my students. My lessons and units were designed to be Hawaii-centric and anti-Imperialist. “The Pedagogy of Aloha” by Dr. Ku Kahakalau was something I felt should be innate to teaching in Hawaii: focusing on relationships to cultivate relevance and rigor. Yet, at the end of my fifth year in the classroom, I was not that teacher. It was under these conditions that I began taking courses in the summer of 2017. Little did I realize that at the end of 2018, my life would be radically different from where I started; and my practice would by radically improved.
In that first summer, I took Teacher Education (TE) 818: Curriculum in its Social Context. That class had me revisit the historic and political reasons why schools function and their place within American society. This was a perfect class to start my educational journey as it made me examine all of the issues that I had with schools in general. I found great commonality with thinkers like Sir Ken Robinson and Todd Rose. Robinson rallies against the past factory-like models of education that produce like-minded workers, and suggests teachers force their students to be creative. Rose argues to destroy the very core concepts of comparing students to each other, and ultimately against a non-existent “average student.” Although I had found these thinkers before starting my masters program, it was in this first summer that I was able to step back from my practice and question my methods. I was able to revisit my teaching philosophy and remember why I had become a teacher in the first place. This also could not have happened if I had not taken the summer off to focus on my studies.
The next semester, I took two courses: one was the most affirming class I had in my program, and the other, the most difficult. In Counseling, Educational Psychology & Special Education (CEP) 818: Creativity in Teaching and Learning I found a professor who demonstrated all of the things I wanted to do in my teaching. Dr. Carmen Mahealani Richardson set up the class to extend student thinking. This allowed me to reconsider and create ways to incorporate creativity into my classroom. The class focused on experimentation, collaboration, and reflection. Students created different products to reflect their understanding of the material, and were encouraged to attempt other mediums to show comprehension. Through these elements, students were encouraged to reflect and act in ways that allowed for personal growth. Her grading system clearly reflected her goals, allowing everyone to start at a 4.0, or A, and only detracted points if the expectations of the class were not being met. This kind of inversion of an age-old educational structure spoke to me and gave me courage to try similar deviations in my practice. Finally, she was able to give me further personal encouragement as she is an educator on Hawaii Island, working towards one of my personal goals to empower Hawaiian students.
While my creative fires were ablaze in CEP 818, Education (ED) 800: Educational Inquiry felt like a torrential downpour upon them. The expectations of this course were the polar opposite: read a text, write a paper, get credit for the work. In contrast to the elevation and encouragement received in CEP 818, I was being critiqued over miniscule details in ED 800. When I questioned the relevance of the content, I was encouraged to just knuckle down and get the work in. My written conclusions were judged and demerited in my grade. Despite this difficulty, ED 800 led me to one of my most influential revelations of my program: Academics and educators are not equivalent. While someone may know a whole lot about a particular topic, that does not qualify them to lead others in exploring that content. Inversely, just because someone is a teacher does not mean they have the skillset to handle the rigors of academia. This was liberating for me, especially as I looked at my goals as a teacher: to reach students who did not do particularly well in school. We do not all have to be academics, we simply have to succeed in our calling. I connected this back to my experience as a swimmer and a coach: just because someone was fast in the water did not mean they could successfully guide a novice in strokework. In fact, I usually noticed the opposite. For a gifted athlete, the fundamentals come naturally and easily and explaining them to someone who just does not get it can be frustrating.
While it was difficult juggling the duality of my Fall 2017 semester, it helped me bring to light my philosophy of education that I had worked on during the summer into practice. I was teaching a line of Hawaiian History and Civics and was able to implement more creativity and Hawaiian culture. I had also been given leadership over a small team, which I immediately shifted the focus from quantitative data collection to teacher well-being and efficacy. I took the aspects of learning creatively and adapted them to leading creativity. Over the course of the year, my team would regularly report that they felt listened to and respected. Instead of collecting the quantitative data on perceived teacher efficacy, I referenced it through qualitative data, such as personal narratives, which was presented to the school administration.
Though I was getting confirmation that my philosophy and practices were successful among colleagues, I was not getting the same responses by administration. I later found out that my direct supervisor was receiving a lot of criticism from the administration that I was not fulfilling my leadership position properly; according to them, I was lacking in context-based quantitative data they needed for their purposes. In my enhanced teacher evaluation, I received an “effective” score, despite displaying some lessons for observation that I thought had been perfect encapsulations of my best teaching practices. It became evident that my newly articulated philosophy and practice were not appreciated in the school I was at. It was time for a change. At the behest of my wife, I applied to teach at Kamehameha Schools, and all Native Hawaiian private school. This was a radical departure for me, since I have always been an advocate for the necessity of quality public education, but I needed to find a school that would recognize and respect my philosophy. The support I have received at Kamehameha has allowed me to enact my pedagogy to its potential, and become the teacher I want to be.
Now, at the end of this journey, I am able to come to a very clear conclusion over the message I can take away from this program: Education should be focused directly on the development of the innate individuality of students, and not a standard set of exercises for everyone to undertake in a comparison of ability. Schools should abandon structures like ED 800: rigid, monolithic, and demanding conformity. Instead, they should look more like CEP 818: encouraging, differentiated, and growth based. Our jobs as educators should be to bring out the best in each student, whatever their best might be, accepting that it may not be strictly within our definition of the content. Rather, we need to help students apply themselves into their definition of the content and evaluate themselves in their understanding.
This is not a call for abandoning materials considered essential to learning in favor of total student choice; students must still be challenged with ideas outside of their understanding and extended into deeper thoughts. But the methods and mediums of gaining and expressing that understanding should be a collaboration between the teacher and the individual student. There is no reason why students can not demonstrate their understanding in different ways.
Critics of this approach would be concerned that allowing students control over their evaluation would lead to a lack of rigor. Their view is that students are apt to take an “easy way out” such as drawing a picture instead of writing an essay. I argue that if the teacher creates a genuine working relationship with the student, with clear expectations, that the student choosing to produce a visual will create a Mona Lisa rather of a stick figure. I also challenge those critics to try their hand in creating some of the works that I have received over the past year, such as these below:
Finally, in order to excel as educators, we must recognize that the beings we are attempting to grow are unique in their abilities and experiences. Their individuality must be fostered and reinforced prior to the strains of academic rigor, and validated throughout their journey. I would never have completed this program if it were not for the support of various instructors, my colleagues, my friends, and my family. Once we create this environment in all our classrooms, our students will exceed all of our expectations.